Stuck, with absolutely no options
How many of us throw up our hands, pout off to our corner, or sit and cry out of complete exhaustion and frustration when we find ourselves stuck.
Being stuck could be as simple as not being able to decide which restaurant to at for your birthday dinner when grandpa is buying!. You have just too many. Stuck could be trying to decide whether to marry him/her or not or to keep dating a bit more hope there will be a change. Stuck could also be smack dab in the middle of a spirit killing job that is draining the life out of you but there are absolutely no options for the needed change.
Stuck can be a whole host of situations where we find ourselves with absolutely no options…. or so we think. Stuck isn’t always, really stuck. It’s just stuck so far, right before we have that breakthrough, that aha moment, that spark of imagination, that flicker of light through the crushing crags of our suffocating rock enforced situation.
Now don’t get me wrong. There are times when there are absolutely no options to our being stuck. However, those times are fewer than you might think.
Yes, it may take extra energy, sacrifice beyond what one could imagine, painful loss of our current reality that we have accepted as our only option. But it rarely is. So, what can we do when we truly feel stuck, with absolutely no options.
I love how the Heath brothers, in their book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work., offer a plan for getting unstuck.
We must WRAP our imagination around the possibility of getting unstuck. And that is really the first action before we work through their acrostic plan,: we have to have a vision for wanting to get unstuck. We have to tap into the inner resources that can help to use to the unthinkable to get unstuck. We have to capture or paint a vision of a different reality that we currently are in.
That is what Aron Ralston had to do when we found himself literally stuck, between a rock and hard place in the Bluejohn Canyon in Utah, with absolutely no options. During a solo hiking venture a boulder shifted, “pinning his right wrist to the side of the canyon wall.” He had no options. However, he did. But it wasn’t one that he wanted to take. It would be too painful. It would be completely unimaginable. If anyone was stuck, with absolutely no options, it was Aron. However, it was not. The option he chose was to use his dull pocketknife to amputate his arm and free him from his stuck situation where he would have surely died. And that is what he chose. But it took the willingness to see a different future that can often start by answering the questions: If I woke up tomorrow and.my situation was completely different but was exactly like I want it to be, what would that look like? Yes, it may be too grandiose. It takes big ideas to get humans unstuck in our own minds first before we can ever entertain possible options of actually getting existentially unstuck.
After we can mentally come to terms what it may take to get unstuck, like Aron had to, we then can walk through the WRAP acrostic offered by Chip and Dan Heath.
WIDEN YOUR OPTIONS
This is where we brainstorm all possible options, the crazy, the outlandish, the ridiculous, the ones that may cost more money than we possibly could imagine. They need to be big, hairy, and audacious as Jim Collins and Jerry Porras would coin in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.” Get writing. Anything and everything. Most of the ideas will never, ever be a possibility. But that doesn’t matter right now We are trying to get unstuck from the paradigms that bind us our current reality. We are trying to get our brains moving. It’s like when your car is stuck in the snow. You may want to go right but at this point we just have to get unstuck first AND then we can steer in a different direction. Sweep the cobwebs out of your imagination. Write them all down.
REALITY TEST YOUR ASSUMPTIONS
Next, we are going to test each of the options that we brainstormed, and evaluate them the most realistic or even remotely possible options.
This is important here. We have to keep our imaginations on high creative alert because some of the big, hairy, and audacious ideas would completely out of the picture but they can act as a catalyst to other possible options that were overlooked in the first round of brainstorming. These would be secondary options: ones that you would have NEVER considered in your previous stuck situation. They are the options on the other side of the ridge that can’t be seen from being stuck. However, once you start rattling off all of these options en route toward a new reality, secondary options come into the focus of possibility.
We have to look at each of the options square in the eye and begin choosing the ones that have a slight possibility of being realistic options. We can’t go with 100% realistic; that is what often gets us stuck in the first place. The good is often sacrificed on the altar of the perfect and we remain stuck. So inventory your options for possibilities. And then begin to choose the ones you can reality test. This takes doing your homework, going on a fact-finding mission to see which ones, with a little work, might actually have some potential.
It’s also important to choose the ones that could tap into your intrinsic motivation (your deepest wants) providing you with the fortitude and energy to push through some natural obstacles, hopefully not like cutting off your arm, but possibly, metaphorically similar.
ATTAIN DISTANCE BEFORE DECIDING
Once we have narrowed down the most realistic options (keeping the ones we have scrapped for later imaginative sparks), we need to take a step back. Sometimes, our eagerness for the short-term relief of being unstuck can blind us to the long-term negatives that we may need to consider. In Aron’s situation, there really wasn’t time for this stage. He faced death or death. Not much of an option. We often have more time. The Heath brothers suggest asking what we might tell a best friend to do if they were in a similar situation. We may simply sleep on it. However, we must be careful, our unconscious stuck self, unwilling to do what is seemingly too difficult may quietly whisper sabotaging messages intent on blowing up our newly brainstormed options.
PREPARE TO BE WRONG
Finally, we have narrow down options, again brainstorming ALL possible strategies that we could use to carry out and implement this newly discovered option. We have to formulate and be prepared to execute our plan, always choosing the steps that would provide the biggest bang for the buck, or in this case, be motivationally satisfying that we are actually starting to get unstuck.
But we must be prepared to be wrong. This may seems like a momentum stopper.. It could be but it is actually helping us develop the ability to face reality. That is what Aron had to do. This may be a wrong option. Help could just be around the corner. And yet I must face reality and proceed with eyes wide open.
One suggestion that Dan and Chip offer is conducting a premortem. The premortem is when you visualize that the option you chose was actually the wrong one and it completely failed. But by going through this mental exercise you are learning what could go wrong which would inadvertently derail any forward progress you would be making. To get unstuck, one must face the reality of a difficult road ahead or else you would have been unstuck long ago.. Easy options were spent up a long time ago.
As you begin working this new plan, as difficult as it may be at first and even throughout the grueling process, your motivation starts to increase as you see a small dim light at the end of the long tunnel you have been stuck in for so long. You couldn’t have seen it before because you so strongly believed that you were so stuck, with absolutely no options.
In addition to preparing being wrong, you must prepare for parts of the plain to fail or need to be adjusted. Practice what you might say or do if part of the plan collapses on the road out of being stuck.
Here is the reality. We often find ourselves in stuck situations., but we are only stuck there by the prison guard of our own brains. The rut we find ourselves in seems more comforting because we know what it is than the unknown, scary possibilities that are out there. And so we sit, stuck, with no options.
But that just isn’t the case.
To put a fine point on this post, I encourage you to watch an absolutely brilliant sudoku-puzzle-solving video by Simon Anthony who felt stuck in his online puzzle because he was given crazy rules and just two numbers on the sudoku board. Watching him work through his situation where he found himself stuck, with absolutely no options is a joy to watch.
And it will be a joy to watch you get unstuck, as you begin working on your own life puzzle as you break out from your stuck situation.
Blessings.
Rondel
